This was my biggest fear in joining this community; I did not want to be the clueless kid who forced the grown-ups to humor her. I’m quite new, so I don’t know how accurate this is, but I must say that the oldest comments on Overcoming Bias (around 2007-2008) were actually of a much lower quality than the 2009-2010 comments on Less Wrong. Maybe it was because OB, being sponsored by Oxford, had a higher rate of drive-by trolling?
As far as I can tell, Less Wrong is still intimidating enough to deter well-meaning newcomers from saying too much, although nothing but boredom kills trolls. Still, anything that increases traffic will pull quality of discourse toward the mean, unless we can somehow accomplish the miraculous task of bringing newcomers up to the LW mean.
Is there a way to quickly bring people up to speed on the spirit of the law, rather than just the letter of the law? Is there a way to make people want to display their curiosity, their ability to admit mistakes, their thick-skinned, careful consideration of criticism? Saying “I was wrong,” “Thanks for explaining my mistake,” “I’m confused,” etc is a sign of status among more established Less Wrong members (admittedly, the mistakes made shouldn’t be too elementary, and it definitely helps if you’re high status already). How do we get newcomers to care about this particular measure of status from the get-go?
Make It Stick gives us a simple heuristic for getting ideas to burrow in people’s heads and inspire them to action: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story.
This says to me that we need to distill the spirit of truth-seeking and truth-speaking into something with the emotional resonance of a proverb—while avoiding the creepy cult vibe that the overtly religious phrasing of the Sequences tends to bring about. We then need to display this short credo prominently on the front page.
Our current main page is a flood of information. I think it’s quite elegantly designed, but the problem with the word “rationality” is that everyone uses it and everyone thinks they know what it means.
Maybe the front page should have a prominent “New? Start Here” button, which could be used to distill the intellectual culture of this place in an easy-to-swallow nugget. I would have definitely found that helpful.
The pursuit of rationality has to have emotional significance; emotions and values are like hooks onto which ideas can cling. We might be able to reduce the problem of newcomers diluting the culture if we focus on instilling the (honest) emotions we ourselves feel around the subject.
Unfortunately, I see lots of way for this to go wrong in a Dark Arts, manipulative kind of way, but the Sequences, for one, managed to get emotion right for the most part.
This was my biggest fear in joining this community; I did not want to be the clueless kid who forced the grown-ups to humor her. I’m quite new, so I don’t know how accurate this is, but I must say that the oldest comments on Overcoming Bias (around 2007-2008) were actually of a much lower quality than the 2009-2010 comments on Less Wrong. Maybe it was because OB, being sponsored by Oxford, had a higher rate of drive-by trolling?
As far as I can tell, Less Wrong is still intimidating enough to deter well-meaning newcomers from saying too much, although nothing but boredom kills trolls. Still, anything that increases traffic will pull quality of discourse toward the mean, unless we can somehow accomplish the miraculous task of bringing newcomers up to the LW mean.
Is there a way to quickly bring people up to speed on the spirit of the law, rather than just the letter of the law? Is there a way to make people want to display their curiosity, their ability to admit mistakes, their thick-skinned, careful consideration of criticism? Saying “I was wrong,” “Thanks for explaining my mistake,” “I’m confused,” etc is a sign of status among more established Less Wrong members (admittedly, the mistakes made shouldn’t be too elementary, and it definitely helps if you’re high status already). How do we get newcomers to care about this particular measure of status from the get-go?
Make It Stick gives us a simple heuristic for getting ideas to burrow in people’s heads and inspire them to action: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story.
This says to me that we need to distill the spirit of truth-seeking and truth-speaking into something with the emotional resonance of a proverb—while avoiding the creepy cult vibe that the overtly religious phrasing of the Sequences tends to bring about. We then need to display this short credo prominently on the front page.
Our current main page is a flood of information. I think it’s quite elegantly designed, but the problem with the word “rationality” is that everyone uses it and everyone thinks they know what it means.
Maybe the front page should have a prominent “New? Start Here” button, which could be used to distill the intellectual culture of this place in an easy-to-swallow nugget. I would have definitely found that helpful.
The pursuit of rationality has to have emotional significance; emotions and values are like hooks onto which ideas can cling. We might be able to reduce the problem of newcomers diluting the culture if we focus on instilling the (honest) emotions we ourselves feel around the subject.
Unfortunately, I see lots of way for this to go wrong in a Dark Arts, manipulative kind of way, but the Sequences, for one, managed to get emotion right for the most part.